Hiroshi Sugimoto

“My dear Sugimoto, you refer in your theaters, drive-ins and seascapes to “chronos,” the time of wisdom. Time passes through your camera. It does not stop like in the dioramas, but lets the image flow unceasingly into abstraction. While I know you do not feel guilty for luring the viewers into the deception of these historical spaces, I know you feel uncomfortable indulging in the risk of entertaining them. You allow their eyes to adjust and to forget that real awareness does not arrive from clarity but from confusion, from the uncertainty of reality. For you, reality is like that in Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s masterpiece La vida es sueno (Life is a Dream) (1636), where life is simply a dream. You convince the viewer like, Basilio the King of Poland in the play convinces his son Segismund, that life outside is just a dream and that reality is actually what we experience while sleeping. Francesco Bonami, excerpted from Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture.

Known for his long-exposure photographic series of empty movie theaters and drive-ins, seascapes, museum dioramas, and waxworks, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been turning his camera on international icons of the twentieth-century since 1997. Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Introduction by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Text by Klaus Ottmann.

The meticulous practice of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is like that of a painter's. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's obsession with the mechanics of space and the mathematical foundations of his works, such as "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (or "The Large Glass"), Sugimoto photographed nineteenth-century mathematical models from the collection at the Komaba Museum at the University of Tokyo, which also features the third and last authorized replica of Duchamp's "Large Glass." Like the models that Man Ray photographed in the 1930s at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, these objects also require a visual understanding of complicated trigonometry functions. This is the first publication to compare and contrast Sugimoto's photographs of mathematical models with his own mathematical models—computer-controlled precision tools made of aluminum.

Published by Damiani.Text by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began his four-decade-long series Dioramas in 1974, inspired by a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Surrounded by the museum's elaborate, naturalistic dioramas, Sugimoto realized that the scenes jumped to life when looked at with one eye closed. Recreated forestry and stretches of uninhabited land, wild, crouching animals against painted backgrounds and even prehistoric humans seemed entirely convincing with this visual trick, which launched a conceptual exploration of the photographic medium that has traversed his entire career. Focusing his camera on individual dioramas as though they were entirely surrounding scenes, omitting their frames and educational materials and ensuring that no reflections enter the shot, his subjects appear as if photographed in their natural habitats. He also explores the power of photography to create history--in his own words, "photography functions as a fossilization of time." Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas narrates a story of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, from prehistoric aquatic life to the propagation of reptile and animal life to Homo sapiens' destruction of the earth, circling back to its renewal, where flora and fauna flourish without man. Here Sugimoto writes his own history of the world, an artist's creation myth.Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at Rikkyõ University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York and Tokyo.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Text by Armin Zweite.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the best-known photographic artists of our time. His unique accomplishment in photography has been to contradict the medium’s conventional task--namely, to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with aformal reduction of images, by which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography,” he said in 2002. “Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” This volume presents a group of images that Sugimoto has been working on for a long time. From a technical perspective, the nature of the pictures is undeniably photographic, but in terms of how they are perceived and understood, they might be more readily ascribed to a painterly or conceptual sphere. The point of departure for the 15 works, titled Revolution, is a nocturnal seascape, rotated 90 degrees to turn the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night. The suite’s title alludes not to social unrest, but rather to an overturning of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods. Without changing the pictures’ material substance or subject, the usual connotations of nocturnes are obviated; instead, highly original abstract configurations emerge.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Edited by Pia Müller-Tamm. Text by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kerry Brougher.

Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's "Boden Sea" for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: "I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist," he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, "Lightning Fields" (2006) and "Photogenic Drawings" (2007).Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.

Art and Perspective in the Work of Duchamp, Sugimoto and Jeff Wall

Published by Walther König, Köln.By Hans Belting.

In this new book by Hans Belting, three essays are united by one theme—the persistence of perspective after its supposed demise in the hands of modernism. Belting addresses perspective in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jeff Wall, in the process opening up new approaches to their work. According to Belting, the door that Marcel Duchamp installed for his final masterpiece, “Etant Donnés” (which Belting tells us was inspired by a bout of seasickness on a trip to Buenos Aires) was a decisive touchstone for both Sugimoto and Wall in their formative years, and he demonstrates how they have referenced its maker many times since. Belting's argument, embellished with many illustrations, makes for a thorough reassessment of perspective.

Published by Walther König, Köln.Essay by Hans Belting.

This lavish book is the only complete collection of the renowned Theaters series, in which Hiroshi Sugimoto opens his shutter as a film begins and closes it as it concludes. "Different movies give different brightnesses. If it's an optimistic story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it's a sad story, it's a dark screen. Occult movie? Very dark."

Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers.Essays by David Elliott, Kerry Brougher and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's images freeze time and space, revealing the workings of our own vision, slowing down the act of perception long enough that it becomes a palpable component of his work. His earliest photographs were images of decadent movie palaces built in the 1920s and 1930s. By timing the exposure of his photos to the exact length of the film being screened, he produced images that depict theater interiors bathed in the magical glare of an all-white screen: pure light. Next Sugimoto began a body of work that he continues to this day, photographing views of the sea from land, traveling around the world to make pictures that, despite their vastly different geographic origins, seem at first to be the same, with only slight variations. Their captions, however, confirm that each is of a different body of water: Caspian, Ligurian, Black. Other series include his out-of-focus impressions of landmark architectural monuments, wherein the Empire State Building, Le Corbusier's Chapel de Notre Dame du Haut, and Tadao Ando's Church of Light in Osaka, among others, are essentialized rather than documented. This volume presents a monographic retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto's complete body of work, including the projects described above and others. New, mostly unpublished images from his recent color work are featured: impressions of the impeccably proportioned shrine Sugimoto designed in Naoshima Island in Japan, as well as a series entitled Colors of Shadow. Specially commissioned essays by photography curators David Elliot and Kerry Brougher examine Sugimoto's work in depth, while an exhibition history and bibliography round out the volume.

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Edited by Nancy Spector and Tracey Bashkoff. Essays by Norman Bryson, Thomas Kellein and Carol Armstrong.

New Lower Price Hiroshi Sugimoto here turns to the wax figures he first explored in his Dioramas series. Combining poetic imagination and noble elegance, this body of work presents life-size black-and-white portraits of historical figures--Henry VIII, each of his six wives and Oscar Wilde, among others--photographed in wax museums and dramatically lit so as to create haunting images. Featuring an interview with the artist by Tracey Bashkoff and essays by Carol Armstrong, Norman Bryson, Thomas Kellein and Nancy Spector, this book offers fresh insights into the work of this important contemporary artist. Portraits was created specially for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and was exhibited at the former Guggenheim Soho.

Published by D.A.P./Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.Photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Edited by Francesco Bonami. Contributions by John Yau. Text by Marco de Michelis, Robert Fitzpatrick.

Known for his long-exposure photographic series of empty movie theaters and drive-ins, seascapes, museum dioramas, and waxworks, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been turning his camera on international icons of twentieth-century architecture since 1997. His deliberately blurred and seemingly timeless photographs depict structures as diverse as the Empire State Building, Le Corbusier's Chapel de Nütre Dame du Haut, and Tadao Ando's Church of Light in Osaka. The resulting black-and-white photographs, shot distinctly out of focus and from unusual angles, are not attempts at documentation but rather evocation--meant to isolate the buildings from their contexts, allowing them to exist as dreamlike, uninhabited ideals. Among the other buildings represented in the series are Philippe Starck's Asahi Breweries, Fumihiko Maki's Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, the United Nations Building, the Chrysler Building, Giuseppi Terragni's Santelia Monument Como, the World Trade Center, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Antonio Gaud''s Casa Batll* II, the 1922 Schindler House, and buildings by Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others in Europe, North America and Asia.